As a dyslexic, I think the best way to describe it is an input/output problem. What you sense and what you are able to output are garbled.
Maybe a better way is to say it’s a problem of order and direction. For example, when I was in the second grade, I couldn’t tell you what the beginning sound of a word was. I could tell you one of the sounds of the word, but I wasn’t sure which one was the beginning sound. I couldn’t do rhyming either. It was simply beyond my capabilities. Words that sound alike? You mean like “house” and “sound”?
Even later, I had a hard time with letter ordering. For example, I thought spaghetti was pronounced pagesti. When I later learned to read (about the sixth grade), I simply assumed that pagesti and spaghetti were both long thin Italian noodles and that they were somehow different. Other double vocabulary words includes castafrope vs. catastrophe and oniniponent vs. omnipotent.
My vocabulary was double of most people simply because my verbal vocabulary and my written vocabulary were two distinct languages.
Visually, I was unable to read or even understand a written sentence until I was allowed to use my finger to help keep the letters and words straight. Even once I was able to read fluently, I couldn’t write a sentence until I almost graduated high school.
It took me years to overcome many of my difficulties. I didn’t finally graduate college until I was in my thirties.
So is dyslexia a visual hallucination?? You do enough mushrooms and letters will be jumping around backwards too, but somehow I can’t imagine that this is what’s going on.
Yes, thinking too much about what they’re doing is what trips everyone up. With stutterers, they spend too much time trying to listen to their own voice.
This is a common theme, and I’m trying to figure out if dyslexia is related? Tripping up by trying too hard or thinking too consciously of what you’re doing?
Dyslexia isn’t about trying too hard, or being too self conscious (and neither is stuttering). The ability to read isn’t just a visual function, it’s something that requires a lot of specialized processing - just like recognizing faces. There are just so many things that can go awry with it, whether from genetics, injury, environmental issues, or what have you.
I thought i read someone wrote backwards as a child. As a kindergardener I signed my name on pictures i drew with each letter being a mirror image of what it was supposed to be in the correct order and in childish type penmanship so an “E” would look like a 3.
I don’t think I’m dyslexic now or dyslexic to the point of writing things in mirror image like when i was a toddler. But am I still dyslexic? never thought to have needed to be checked up on that because my grades were above average after grade two.
**So **glad I’m not the only person who did this–I went up to my sixth-grade teacher to tell her that she’d misspelled “derbis” as “debris.” :smack: I also figured out that my “anhillation” was the same as “annihilation” in my AP English class senior year of high school when someone was reading aloud. Fortunately, this didn’t extend to all words–just the ones my brain had scrambled the first time I read them (and kept scrambling thereafter).
But, of course, just about everyone makes and has made those same types of transpositions and errors. And lots of kids remain convinced that there are two words, say, bisketti and spaghetti for the same thing for a long time. These mixups are not dyslexia. Dyslexia is a catchall term for a wide variety of significant reading problems, all of which are still somewhat mysterious to researchers. There are a number of studies that simply focus on the definition, itself, in fact.
But I guess, also, that the philosophical question that I posed in the OP won’t be addressed. Oh, well…
Dyslexia isn’t a disease. It’s how your brain works.
However, as you get older, you learn to adapt to your way of thinking and organizing. There might be certain jobs you avoid (I could never be a proof reader, for example), and find areas where you do excel.
There are still many adult dyslexics who never learned to read, but I think many of them finally got the knack of it.
However, I still get tripped up over various words. I was reading this article about people and their chickens the other day. Apparently these people were not happy with the way their chickens are learning in this school because most of these chickens were reading below grade level.
I was thinking, “So what the chicken is reading below grade level? I mean the fact that the school has managed to teach these chickens to read seems pretty good.”
Then it suddenly dawned on me that the article wasn’t about chickens, but children!
Middlebro’s dyslexia is pretty much limited to b, p, d, q; it’s specifically a matter of having problems with the relative positions of the vertical line and the circle. In his case, the line of attack for helping with the problem was based on helping his spatial awareness in general. Using a typeface where those four letters have additional visual clues helps too (for example, one with the q’s bar crossed).
I’ve met many dyslexics whose problem was limited to a few letters, but mistaking the a/o pair and the e/i/u trio is a huge problem, specially if don’t know that you do it: nothing makes sense! I met a man in his 40s who mistook those groups (specially a/o, which seemed to be a complete coin toss), had a master’s and was working on another; he didn’t know he was dyslexic, had heard the word but didn’t know what it meant. His wife was illiterate; their eldest son wasn’t dyslexic but of course every time Dad tried to help him study (by asking questions from the book) it would be a royal mess.
Noone with personal experience has addressed this hypothesis of mine.
I think more than being “surprised” by the letters as they’re reading, dyslexics take too much time caring about the letters that they’re reading. Normal people, famously, look at the beginning of a word, its end, its shape, and hardly notice if you scramble the letters in the middle.
The principle is “obviously true” to the same extent that a precisely opposite principle saying “All that matters is that you get the internal letters correctly, but you can replace the first and last letters with whatever you want”, or principles like “All that matters is that you keep every other letter correct, and don’t turn vowels into consonants or vice versa” is obviously true. It’s been over-formalized to sound like a more specific observation than what it really is, and spread with the falsely claimed imprimatur of a non-existent academic study to sound like a more certain law of psychology than it really is.
I’m not sure what you mean by your reference to Wingdings. You said normal people hardly notice if you scramble the letters in the middle of a word. For very carefully constructed examples, particularly with such small words as that there isn’t a large space of scrambled possibilities in the first place, this may be true to the extent that one easily re-interprets small typos of many kinds. However, in my post, I did nothing but the scramble the letters in the middle of words. Was it hardly noticeable?
When we are very young, a lot of imprinting and wiring of our brains takes place without our even being aware of it. If something doesn’t get wired quite like it is supposed to, that can have very important consequences later in life.
Research at Peabody College (George Peabody College for Teachers) in the 1960s indicated that there is very often a direct link between whether or not a baby learns to cross crawl and whether or not she or he later develops dyslexia.
Cross-crawling is moving the left arm and the right leg in synchronization and vice versa.
Hello Again, I was nodding when you typed:
That’s very common. And why is it only a sometimes problem? I don’t know either.
Parents and grandparents should make sure those babies learn to cross-crawl!
Thomas Edison is an example of someone who learned to manage dyslexia reasonably well. That just boggles the mind!
But still, it seems if “normal” readers are confronted by letters that are actually scrambled up (and backwards?), it’s not a terrible problem. They don’t spend much time reading letter-by-letter. It’s too bad noone else has weighed in on the hypothesis that dyslexics just try too hard when reading, get nervous, lose their short-term memory, jot their eyes back and forth, analyze words letter-by-letter, and have just a very bad experience when reading.
I think it was pretty well addressed by the examples of dyslexics simply processing things differently (e.g. in terms of orientation). The kind of problem you describe wouldn’t carry over to other kinds of spatial reasoning.
Her awareness of her problem is not the same that as her being aware when the problem is occuring. She knows she frequently sees things upside down and backwards - but when it’s happening she is not sure if her perception is right or wrong at the time.
She doesn’t see/write everything upside down and backwards. She said it too simply and you interpreted it too broadly. If she auto-corrected, she’d be correcting when the dyslexia didn’t misshape the information as often as not. If she’s dyslexic she sees things flipped, backwards, rotated, and out of order but not in any one consistant way. She’s already compensating just to function near normally.
Several people have pointed out that dyslexia is often accompanied by other spatial issues, not all visual. Mixing up words in memorized dialogue is a common disorder among dyslexic people. As is malapropism.